SHANE LINDEMOEN

Parenthood and the Deep Unknown.

10/13/2013

It's been a while. My head is stuffed with measured quality nipple-shields, burp-methods, swaddling techniques, seedy yellow and black-tar baby-crap and endless high-pitched, end-of-the-world, soul-crushing wails. I'm never entirely sure if I should change his diaper or call a priest. Point is, my son is here. With a vengeance. And he's here to stay.

I've been thinking about my new role as father. I'm still waiting for this sense of awe that people are telling me about. I'm supposed to be overcome with this kind of euphoric man-son abridgment. I haven't felt that yet. But here's what it's like for me.

Have you ever been in very deep, open water? Like the ocean, or a great lake? Because that's what seeing my brand new baby boy was like. It was like seeing the ocean for the first time. And the ocean is a vast thing. An existence apart from us. It's so endless, and beneath its surface is an entire universe of undiscovered, unknown, unobserved and terrifying possibilities. Seeing my son for the first time was like treading open water, peering through a crystalline lens of shock at the immense marine shadows moving slowly and intently beneath my dangling toes. Not seeing the tiny baby he is, but seeing the man that he's going to be, and that he'll be a reflection of me, was the most terrifying thing I've ever experienced. I hope beyond all hope that I don't fail that man, that distant mosaic of me. I hope that he likes me. People say, "bah, of course he'll like you." That's not so easy for me. The first fist-fight I ever got in was with my father. The first of many. He either beat what weaknesses I have into me, or tempered me with bone. I'm still not sure which. I'm not intending to be so intimate, but Hemingway said that writers should write what they have to say instead of speak it, so here I am: my deepest fear is that there's some natural law of the cosmos by which all fathers shall resent their sons, and vice-versa. I can't shake that fear, because it's all I've known, and I hope it drives me to be the best. I hope it pushes me to be a better man.

The first time I saw the ocean, I lost my mind. It was the biggest thing I'd ever seen. The horizon stole my breath. I flipped out and charged into the squall - ten foot waves - my wife as my witness, fully clothed, I swam as hard and as far as I could, not thinking about the deep unknown stretched out below me. It was pure, thoughtless joy - the kind of joy that can only be felt once you've cast yourself into something massive and endless - an absolute torsion release of rope and tether and care and worry. That's how I want to approach this new time in my life. That's the kind of father I want to be.

-Shane.

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An Impassioned Case for Why Predator Was One of the Greatest Films Ever Made.

4/23/2013

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Beware, dear reader: spoilers ahead.

In October 1929, on a Black Tuesday that marked the depth of what economist Irvine Fisher described as the “great plateau,” foreshadowing some pretty heinous irony, (or in other words, embedding what Welles would have described as an excellent plot catalyst) Orson Welles was probably examining the ideal life, trying to understand not only what he was supposed to do with his own, but also how he was supposed to interpret the sort of aimless circumstances he routinely had to contend with. And what he found, clawing through the depths of what he would come to know as loss and abandonment, could have been the origins of something that would one day be meaningful and honest, that the rest of us would be able to look at from the outside in, and see what he never could – an ideal life. A sense of home. Our own cherished Rosebud. Burying both of his parents before the age of 15, at a time when our nation was crumbling to pieces, just before deciding to pack it all up and head across the ocean, I can imagine young Orson coming to the conclusion that an ideal story, and the best kind of performance, comes from a deep yearning for validation.

Citizen Kane wasn’t relevant when it was first released – it was in fact a box office flop, received with such distaste that some circles would actually throw things at the screen whenever it was shown. Citizen Kane would eventually receive the ultimate vindication in the ensuing decades, but at the time it was considered nothing. Lower than nothing. Vilified. Booed on several occasions. People were so angry with the film that Orson was even denounced as a communist by those hoping to get him lynched. If there’s anything we can learn about the production and ultimate success of Citizen Kane (besides the litany of other stuff) it is the fact that tastes change. Relevance is routinely shifted with the times, and we along with it. Welles himself once said,

“In the old days the greatest thing to be was a movie star. Today, the greatest thing in the world to be is a pop-singer. There will never be a great star unless the greatest thing in the world to be is that kind of star. At the end of the last century and before the first World War, the greatest thing in the world to be was an opera singer. People used to faint in the streets when they saw an opera singer. And then there came the movie stars. You see, I think any form of entertainment only exists because it corresponds to a moment in time.”

I couldn’t appreciate Welles until I was much older. I had no precedent for him. Rather, what precedent I did have was from films that had already taken his techniques and made them common – that had mined his methods and refined them so extensively over the years as to make them part of the landscape of contemporary film. It wasn’t until film-studies in college that I discovered why Citizen Kane was even relevant in the first place. I didn’t get it – I had seen the layered dialogue, the tricks of lighting, the editing, the long shots, the extended takes, the usage of cranes, the realistic sets and similar character development done a thousand times before, and done better – it wasn’t anything special. I hadn’t realized that what I would come to understand as contemporary film wouldn’t have happened if it wasn’t for Welles barging into Hollywood the way that he had, pissing everybody off. I remember a few years back how everyone was impressed with the frenetic editing of the Bourne Ultimatum, and how revolutionary it was. Orson was doing similar cuts forty years earlier in his film Chimes of Midnight.

One of my first experiences with film was pretty definitive. My mom had some business or other to attend and plopped me with the nearest willing neighbor, who could think of nothing better to do but plunk me in front of the old CRT and VCR, stick in the first cassette she could find and hit the play button. I watched, rapt, helplessly ensnared by what unfolded until the film was over and the credits finished rolling. When the cassette clicked the end of its tape, the VCR would automatically rewind back to the beginning, instantly replaying the film, starting the whole process over again. And so I sat for at least six hours, perhaps longer. I watched the film, click, rewind, play and watched again. I didn’t have to do anything but sit there – the VCR did the rest. Five years after Orson’s death, at six years of age, in an apartment belonging to a person I had never seen before, I fell hopelessly in love with the medium he helped pioneer. That film was Predator.

It would be a ridiculously stupid mistake comparing the two men, John Mctiernan and Orson Welles, considering Mctiernan’s recent prison entanglements and Orson’s unquestionable genius. There’s no comparison, and I don’t want to give the impression that this was my intention. But screw it, let’s do it anyway.

It is interesting to note the contrary arc of each director’s career. Aside from being assigned writer Shane Black as a chaperon, Mctiernan was given absolute confidence of the Hollywood machine. Welles was countlessly written-off by it. Mctiernan was essentially enabled by his producers while Welles was continuously stifled by them. Mctiernan’s career came to a crashing halt while Orson’s accelerated into the annals of filmmaking legend forever. Both men were essentially directors who ended up specializing in hammed up B-pictures. Both Citizen Kane and Predator were equally hated by critics upon release, only to earn more respect over time.

I think both men would agree that the success or failure of a film isn’t entirely a credit to its direction. You must have the right producer, for the right actors, for the right author, for the right script, for the right production crew – the stars have to align just right and, with a little bit of luck, you may end up with something special. It’s a collaboration which partly has to do with the director, but primarily has to do with the whole, unless, as Welles liked to put it, there were those rare occasions when an exceptional director came along – one who was comfortable handling everything. For Citizen Kane, Orson had Greg Toland and his Mercury troop; Mcteirnan had Donald McAlpine and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Even still, at the onset of Predator’s production, I can just as easily imagine a younger Mctiernien burning in the same need for validation in which Welles burned when he decided to forego stage acting, and conquer Hollywood. In fact, I don’t really have to imagine it – it’s in plain sight, immortalized forever in B-movie one-liners, hyper-masculine machismo, brutal death-scenes and spectacular firefights. I don’t believe Mcteirnan had any delusions about what kind of picture he was expected to make when he was handed the unfinished script, but I believe he wanted to make it special. If it was going to be a B-horror/creature-feature, he was determined to make it the best B-horror/creature-feature ever made. What the actors, writers, and producers pulled off was nothing short of a masterpiece, considering the source material. A flawed masterpiece, perhaps, but a masterpiece nonetheless.

Again, there’s no comparing Mctiernan and Welles. Hell, there isn’t even a justifiable comparison between the films. It would be pointless to even begin to try. That’s not really what this is about. Since I wanted to talk about masterpieces of film, I couldn’t get away with not mentioning the greatest masterpiece of all. Predator was a great film, maybe even the greatest, but what made Citizen Kane and Predator great movies are completely different circumstances: Citizen Kane was great because Orson Welles was great. Predator was great because it corresponded to the most appropriate moment in time.

Orson liked the occasional B-picture – he wrote many, directed few – and I’d like to believe that he would have enjoyed this one. The biggest trick Predator pulled off was masking its very deep philosophical questions with an actionfest exterior. The way things are in Hollywood, I gather that artists can’t get away with affecting us on an emotional level anymore without violently snatching our attention. The money wouldn’t be there otherwise. Art typically sells a couple hundred grand at the box office, maybe a few million if it’s lucky. Unfortunately, the mass market doesn’t go to the movies to see art. We go to be dazzled. We pay billions to have our belief suspended, to see unbelievable and impossible things. That’s another lesson from Citizen Kane. Sure, you could go out and make the greatest film in history, but you will never pull as much revenue as spectacle. The trick is, if you’re an artist with something to say, to get the financial backing you need in order to have a voice, you have to convince people that you’re planning to give them all spectacle, while sneaking the rest through the back door – Orson knew this, and actually resorted to lying about making Treasure Island at one point so that he could get the money to make Macbeth.

The goal for the artist is to sell the spectacle, so that you can then make the art. Predator is like that. From the opening shot of the alien aircraft descending into the dark jungle, to the closing shot of the human aircraft rising out of it, the structure of Predator is a closed loop, shedding more light on the brutal nature of survival than any other film.

The idea for Predator was initially meant as a joke: someone remarked after the release of Rocky IV that the only people left for Rocky to beat up were aliens. Screenwriters Jim and John Thomas heard the idea, and immediately began brainstorming different ways to tell such a story. It’s very similar to a short story called The Most Dangerous Game, in which a man is hunted on an island by a wealthy big-game enthusiast, only Jim and John tell it from a perspective of a man being hunted in a jungle by an extraterrestrial intelligence.

The movie opens with a group of commandos being choppered into a jungle that looks very similar to Vietnam or Southeast Asia. Out steps the cadre of badasses, ready to help dish out your typical AHnold fanfare. The chopper’s landing-zone is mired with humanity – Iron I-beam tetrahedrons spreading across the beach, soldiers bedecked in contrast military regalia everywhere accompanied by stark military vehicles whipping along the jungle’s border. The rainforest looms overhead like a dark cloud of uncertainty, stretching off into the inky blackness therein.

Schwarzenegger’s character Dutch is immediately isolated as the lead – the biggest, most quintessential schematic of masculinity in the entire film. He’s briefed by an old war buddy turned CIA liaison named Dillon, played by Carl Weathers. He explains to Dutch that a group of South American cabinet ministers have crash landed somewhere in the jungles of Guatemala. Their mission is to go in, find ‘em, and get ‘em out safely. There are obviously plot twists, but they’re merely a call-to-action, a way to get the story into the deep dark jungle where all the fun can happen.

This brief exchange at the beginning is relevant, however, and segues nicely into my first point: In those first few minutes, we’re shown that one, Dutch is a passionately loyal leader. Two, he has a very strong code of ethics (his unit is solely an operational rescue detachment, not a strike force). Three, that he is driven, competitive (arm-wrestling match with Dillon), shrewd, intelligent and rational (he’s skeptical about the cabinet minister story, and as soon as Dillon informs Dutch that he’ll be tagging along, friendship-mode is immediately deactivated). Four, he’s a perfect image of the human male – the perfect balance of intelligence, honor and strength.

What Predator did that no other film accomplished before it, was implement the literary concept of “tagging” to such success that it would serve as an example for how it was supposed to be done from then on. Every character in the film was relevant, memorable, and distinguishable from each other. They weren’t contrived. They weren’t corny. They were detailed in such a way that utilized the least amount of exposition and narrative as possible – which left more room for spectacle. Predator pulled this off perfectly.

We saw that each character was given a defining moment through some dialog, and also a physical tether that not only attached them to the story, but differentiated them from every other character. It was seamless, clever, and perfect. This method of characterization wasn’t anything new – movies and television serials have been doing it for… well, since Orson’s day – but none before Predator had anyone pulled off that kind of characterization with as much economy. Jesse Ventura had maybe six lines of dialog, yet we knew and could identify with his character Blain, and thus care when he was taken out of the picture. Everything about Blain told a backstory – the tobacco he was chewing, the resentment he had for Dillon, his snakeskin boots, his safari hat, his MTV t-shirt, his close friendship with Mac, even his dialog – which still consists of one of the most famous lines in modern cinema,

“I ain’t got time to bleed…”

It’s sheer badassery – he’s somebody we can look up to, somebody we could definitely turn to if shit hits the fan. But it doesn’t stop with Blain. You have Sonny Landham’s character, Billy – expert tracker, realist, brave and fatalistic. Interesting sidenote: when Billy was having his Sergeant Rock moments, peering into the trees as if he had some sort of psychic perception – there wasn’t anything supernatural about how he was sensing the predator. He was such an extremely effective tracker that he saw the Predator while it was cloaked, and unconsciously recognized that something was wrong with the landscape – something that he couldn’t articulate in any meaningful way, simply because he had never seen anything like it before.

You had Blain’s friend, Sergeant Mac – played by Bill Duke – who was tagged in one of the film’s more memorable moments, when the razor broke on his cheek, drawing blood. Then there was Hawkins, played by Shane Black, who had the giant glasses and comic books. Poncho, who had the tiger-stripe facepaint and grenade launcher.

Not only were each of the actors brilliantly tagged with things we could recognize them by, they each had excellent, character defining lines, and character defining moments – Blain’s chaw spit and minigun; Aside from the razor, Mac killing the scorpion on Dillon’s shoulder, and his impassioned oath to the moon; Dillon’s redemption; Hawkins’ glasses and his jokes; Billy drinking from the severed vine, and later drawing his own blood in preparation for battle with the Predator. Anna telling the story about El cazador trofeo de los hombres, the Demon Who Makes Trophies of Men.

It was as if each actor were written as the same character, just expressed at different volumes, entirely capable of carrying the plot of their own film. This was probably an accident, mind you – the script was originally written with Schwarzenegger running around the jungle alone – he didn’t like that idea, and asked before committing to the project that it be rewritten to have a squad of commandos, instead of just one guy. In either case, it worked out splendidly, but here’s where it really gets fun.

As the men move deeper into the jungle, you begin to notice that there is more and more flora between the camera and the actors. It’s subtle, but look closely. It’s rare that you don’t see a shot in the film in which there isn’t some jungle obstructing at least a part of the actors from view. It gets more noticeable as the film progresses. The jungle slowly takes over each frame, becoming more flora and less actor, until finally Arnold sheds his clothing, covers himself head to toe with leaves and mud, and completely separates any boundary between he and the jungle. The thing is, as the soldiers get farther away from civilization, they gradually melt into their environment, essentially becoming a part of it.

You see, one of the recurring themes in the film is this notion that the jungle makes animals of us all. The bravado, all of the badass testosterone and machismo mean nothing in that dark milieu of teeth, where everything – from the largest animal to the smallest blade of grass – has been selected by millions of years of evolution to eat you, suck the nutrients out of your corpse, and decompose your empty husk back into the closed system of life. All of our psychological constructs – chivalry, honor, decency, face, justice, duty, friendship, pity, guilt and humor – mean nothing to the jungle. These concepts are luxuries of a big protein-dependent brain, which has over the course of its existence thought its way out of the darkness and into civilization.

You take a modern man and put him in the jungle on his own for an extended period of time, that man will not survive unless he knows how to strip himself of his ideals. He cannot expect to live unless he remembers what it’s like to be an animal again. As the film progresses, the commandos are systematically stripped of concepts such as macho and badass, and slowly succumb to the terror by which our ancestors have survived. Their pithy, wise-ass one liners completely disappear near the end of the film, giving way to cries of terror and exigency. Those who resist this transition die.

Billy can’t let go of his sense of honor, and dies. Mac can’t let go of his sense of revenge, and dies. Hawkins can’t let go of his sense of chivalry, and dies. Dillon can’t let go of his need for redemption, and dies. Blain can’t let go of his arrogance, and dies (remember, a complacent Blain snickers at the porcupine just before lowering his guard). The reason Arnold survives is because he’s the exception, not the rule. He’s the ideal human, not the mean. He simultaneously deconstructs himself while holding onto the deadly strategic presence of thought that makes humanity in fact the most dangerous game in the universe. The reason our species has survived the brutal process of natural selection is not because we have the biggest muscles – it’s because we have the biggest brain. Instead of adapting our bodies to nature, we have figured out ways to adapt nature to us.

The Predator in this film represents the jungle, which is really quite alien when you think about it. It’s a place where strange, chitinous, crawly things with pincers, antennas, bristling arachnid appendages, and hollow venom-filled teeth can be found literally everywhere. Under every stone, inside every tree, and floating in every source of water are parasitic rubbery things capable of burrowing into your flesh. Viruses. Flesh eating bacteria. Neurotoxic plants. Venomous spiders as big as your face. The jungle is a closed recycling bin of caloric energy, and you’re simply a meal. Part of what the Predator represents in this film is nature in its rawest, most prehistoric form. Part of what Dutch represents is humanity’s endless war with nature. You have to understand that what makes us human is our ability to bend nature to our will – to understand how it works so that we can defy it, and thus create the meaning of our own existence. That’s Dutch: the ideal human who remembers what it’s like to be an animal, but doesn’t forget what brought us out of the jungle in the first place.

The Predator is also a dichotomy of two concepts. Part of what the alien represents is nature, and the other part is us. You have to also realize the most arresting, mind-melting part of the film is the complete annihilation of conventional action fare. Imagine for a moment if Arnold and the Predator reversed roles, and the Predator was a human on a foreign planet, taking out an army of alien combatants. There is one movie that describes this situation perfectly: In First Blood Part II, Sylvester Stallone’s character Rambo escapes a POW camp and, after burying his beautiful, in-country attaché under a cairn of stones, he conducts almost a ritual of tying a strip of her red dress around his head like bandanna, and then goes on a murderous rampage, picking off Russians and Vietnamese one at a time with his bow and combat knife. At one point, Rambo is like an invisible wraith of the jungle – a Predator, even – bursting out of the landscape to bury his blade into the throat of an unsuspecting soldier, or snap another soldier’s neck.

What Mctiernan and company accomplished made every action flick that followed almost a parody of itself. In Predator, the humans play roles typical of what most villains are assigned in other action flicks. The Predator plays the role of your typical action-hero – an unstoppable force of violence, an army-of-one with his own unique code of honor, cleverly dispatching the enemy one at time through various methods. He even chooses to have a man-to-man battle of honor with Dutch at the end, dropping all of his weapons (he could have easily blasted Dutch’s face off, or chopped him in half with his wrist-blade, or snapped his neck against the tree whilst holding him a foot off the ground). The Predator, we realize, exhibits a courtesy not even the most heroic of our action heroes would give, thus single-handedly ending a genre – with very few exceptions (Aliens being one of them). Predator is a masterful destruction of the eighties action film.

I forgot this was god forsaken blog-post, not a thesis paper – I was planning to get into more detail. Look, there’s nothing special about Mctiernan. What’s special about Predator is how everything sort of accidentally fell together in a hodgepodge mess of perfection. Orson made the greatest motion picture in history because he’s a genius. Quentin Tarantino made one of the greatest motion pictures in history because he’s a flippin’ genius. Mctiernan made one of the greatest motion pictures in history because he was lucky as hell. He would later go on to ultimately seal the action-genre’s fate with Die Hard a few years later, but that’s another story.

How Predator turned out to be such a psyche job is nothing short of a movie miracle, which ended up inspiring a whole generation of filmmakers. Keep in mind that if Predator hadn’t happened, James Cameron wouldn’t have thought to make Aliens the way he did – which ended up being a far crisper, more exciting film simply because it expanded on the style of characterization, relentless storytelling and themes in Predator. The method of characterization combined with the phenomenal cinematography used to tell an action/slasher story was something nobody saw coming, not even the producers. Not only was the story gripping – something happened on every single page of that manuscript, which moved the plot in a way that was fluid and organic – there was nothing forced about it.

Maybe I’m biased. I mean, there’s no question I’m biased. Predator is my Rosebud, so I’m obviously going to try and champion it. But I truly believe that great films are rare, perhaps even unnoticeable at first. Similar to what happened with Citizen Kane, what’s great will ultimately be determined by the passage of time. Looking back from where I am now, there’s no denying that Predator was a great film. In my heart it’s the greatest.

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The Nine Best Science Fiction Movies You've Probably Never Seen.

2/24/2013

3 Comments

There are three types of movies out there (at least for the purpose of this blog).

The first type (let’s call it mass-market consensus, which is a movie everyone in the bell segment of this particular curve can agree is pretty, more or less okay and buyable) is fairly simple: as the spectacle grows laterally across our culture – after it crosses several dimensions of difference and becomes an international thing – the film transcends the word-of-mouth market paradigm and gets fetishized, franchised, and ends up sticking in the annals of pop-culture for eternity, thus affecting our culture, and even changing the way movies are made from then on. These are movies like Avatar, Batman, Star Wars, Star Trek, Matrix, Indiana Jones, Jaws, Gladiator, Jurassic Park, Terminator 2 and Aliens. You've seen these flicks featured on most Best Films of Whathaveyou lists countless times. These are the greatest movies in their genre (or any genre) that appeal to the largest market chunk, the greatest movies EVER MADE, the crème de medium, the trope makers, the genre benders. . .

The point is, everyone has heard of these flicks. They make it onto everybody’s best film lists, they age well, and every time you happen across them on TV, you’ll stop and watch for a bit. Good flicks that are attached to your very identity, childhood, friendships, templates for masculinity, femininity and adventure. . .

The second type is just as simple. These are the movies you love, that everybody else hates. The anti-blockbuster. The movies that only appeal to the smallest few, that are only significant to a tiny substructure of the market. You hardly ever see them on any lists, and they generally rate low on the various observational report surveys like Rotten Tomatoes, Amazon and Metacritic. But you love these movies, even if you don’t have any delusions about their nature. They’re bad and shoddily produced, horribly written with terrible acting, but none of that matters within the context of your enjoyment. These are the Garbage Pail Kids, Earnest Goes to Jail, Howard the Duck, Street Fighter, and… well, most Van Damme movies. They’re awesome, but not in any way that you could justifiably articulate in public: ego/social-pride entanglements and all that.

The third type is a bit complicated. These are pretty good movies that, for whatever reason – be it poor marketing, shitty release date, low budget or a small box-office window – never seem to catch on. They’re not bad, but the deterministic threads of fate have unfolded in a way that yielded the least amount of public awareness, which pushed them to the wayside of more sensationalized, mass-market blockbusters from the first category. They missed that blockbuster train, but never caught on enough to develop a cult following like the second category, so they languish in that weird margin of half forgotten intellectual properties, waiting for their chance to one day be refurbished into a television series.

These are the movies I’m more interested in, because they’re often the most rewarding to find. Good flicks that most people have probably never heard about, that deserve some reinvigoration. So, in honor of that margin of unkowability, here’s my BEST OF list: The Nine Best Science Fiction Movies You’ve Probably Never Seen, listed in order of awareness-probability, from less to more:

No Escape (1994)

No Escape happened in 1994, when Ray Liotta was still experiencing the upswing of his Goodfellas success, before the dark Revolver and In the Name of the King days. NE was an opportunity for Liotta to break out of his lowlife gangster typecast and become an A-listing action star, and he didn't do too bad of a job.

NE was adapted from a novel called THE PENAL COLONY, by Richard Herley. It’s essentially a futuristic prison movie about a privatized and unregulated system that leaves prisoners on an island in the middle of nowhere to die. The culture of the island splits into two camps that both contend with the forces of scarcity: the tournament, cannibalistic side called The Outsiders, and the pair-bonding, reciprocally altruistic side called The Insiders. The Outsider camp is run by a steely eyed Marek, played by an excellent Stuart Wilson, while the Insiders are led by Lance Henriksen’s Gandhi-like character called The Father. Naturally, these camps battle each other for access to resources and control of the island, and remain largely ignored by the prison administration as long as they don’t try to escape. Think LORD OF THE FLIES mixed with equal parts ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK.

Liotta plays Robbins, an ex-marine who’s sentenced to this island-prison after assassinating his commanding officer. Naturally, Robbins is caught in the middle of camp conflict, which kicks the plot into motion. Secrets are learned, hijinks ensue, heads roll. . . it’s a good time. There are more highbrow themes at play here (womanless and homo-androgynous society, the dangers of privatized penal systems, nihilism, fervent nationalism, universal absolutism, constitutional objectivism, the morality of following unethical orders) but it’s subtle and not all up in your grill about it. It’s great action, above average dialogue (some really good lines) clearly defined characters, above average acting, and just plain fun. It’s a good flick that went generally unnoticed during all of the FOREST GUMP and PULP FICTION excitement.

Carriers (2007)

This was a poorly communicated idea, commercially. I actually thought that it was another zombie apocalypse movie. There are no zombies in this one, for better or worse. I mean, it’s thematically the same thing, but it accomplishes what most zombie flicks try to communicate without zombies. When you think about it, the zombies in most zombie flicks aren't detrimental to what the stories are trying to convey – zombies are just one method for telling that particular narrative – because the idea is usually small-group isolation and survival. You can essentially substitute the zombie trope with anything that forces the characters into isolation, where they have to learn to work together in order to survive.

CARRIERS is basically a viral pandemic flick starring Chris Pine (Captain Kirk) and that SHHMMMOOKIN’ hot chick from COYOTE UGLY. It’s really, really well acted. Since there is no threat of brainless cannibals, there’s significantly less action. Story follows a group of young folks on a road-trip after a nameless plague wipes out civilization. Things get a bit intense when the group comes across other people – and since the virus is extremely hard to detect in its early stages, it’s impossible to know who’s infected and who isn't. The cadre of travelers survive by a very simple premise: the infected are already dead.

They travel across the countryside in a moving quarantine – rubber gloves, medical masks and buckets of bleach – avoiding others as much as they can. Their destination? A childhood beach resort, where they can wait out the desolation in peace.

The film is a thought piece. The idea is whether or not our ethics and morality can survive under world-ending circumstances. Most of these zombie slash end-of-the-world flicks see humanity -- human decency and society -- as mutually exclusive. If one collapses, the other soon follows. Carriers handles this theme a bit differently than most zompoc flicks, which usually tend to fetishize the rise of fascism, brutality, marauders, bandits, and cutthroat-destruction in the wake of a societal collapse. What Carriers says is probably a bit darker – ironic, considering its tone and low body count – which is the idea that, in the direst of situations, the decision between indifference and sticking to our moral standards is the same thing as deciding between life and death. Indifference means life to most people, and staying true to our ethical structure of morals usually means death, which is pretty horrifying when you think about it. The Samurai had a similar way of thinking about honor. . .

It’s sad. But good.

Primer (2004)

Primer is a time-travel story, and arguably one of the most accurate in terms of functionally demonstrable science. It’s about a couple of engineers who are trying to build a device that lowers an object’s mass, which unforeseeably creates a mechanism that allows things to travel back in time. The movie was written and directed by an actual engineer, Shane Curruth – which is probably why it’s so eerily plausible. The man has science on his side, after all (interesting side-note, not only did Curruth star in Primer, he was also one of the main consultants for last year’s Loopers, which was another phenomenal time travel story starring JGL and The BWILLIS). Primer had an exceptionally low-budget (cost of production was $7,000, which sounds insane in the wake of this current $200 million dollar production budget trend) and the acting is… okay. But that’s not the point. The point is that this is a puzzle – and a satisfying puzzle at that, with many layers. It almost watches like a documentary – the editing and cinematography are really grainy and lacking flare – which works well enough, and doesn't distract from story. It might be slow for some, but I personally like my sci-fi in two flavors: slow or fast. Slow, heady, intense and dramatic sci-fi like 2001 space odyssey, Alien, and Solaris – all good – and fast sci-fi like Fifth Element, Predator and T2.

Primer is of the former.

Big concepts aplenty, here - like the causality of things that have yet to happen doubling back to our present to affect paradoxes in the future, triggering the collapse of temporal causalities into nonexistence, which threaten the fabric of reality and. . . well, fun stuff that merit several viewings. If you like your mind blown, you’ll like this.

Strange Days (1995)

There was a brief period in the nineties when the cyberpunk subgenre of science fiction had a pretty decent run – there was… Strange Days, Johnny Mnemonic (terrible) Hackers. . . I think it culminated with The Matrix, which ended up killing the genre simply because it couldn't be topped (not even by its sequels, apparently). There were more cyberpunk flicks (mostly anime), but these received the most attention. Strange Days came about during the initial wave of millennium-paranoia, which serves nicely as an ominous backdrop for the story: the idea was that the world as we knew it was, you know, going to end at the stroke of midnight, Jan 1 2000. We recently experienced a similar yet brief acceleration in this market during the 2012 Mayan calendar crap.

Under its surface, Strange Days is actually a pretty thought provoking film with some serious weight behind it – directed by Kathryn Bigelow (the woman who made Hurt Locker) written and produced by James Cameron. Strange Days has a cool narrative device called SQUID (Superconducting Quantum Interference Device) that allows users to record their experiences and sell them to others who can then live vicariously through their memories.

The plot is basic detective noire/thriller set in the near future (well, now our past). An ex-cop named Nero – played by Ralph Fiennes – is targeted by a serial killer who uses the SQUID technology while dispatching his victims. Said psychopath taunts Nero with macabre recordings of his nasty expressions until a pretty satisfying climax. Angela Basset is in this too, and she does a lot of spin-kicks – spin-kicks the crap out of an extremely androgynous chick/dude with dreadlocks, if I remember right. SD deals with virtual reality themes and immersion, the blending of biology and technology, addiction, isolation, celebrity, police brutality and racism.

It was a good sci-fi movie that went overlooked by many. Check it out.

Moon (2009)

This movie is all Sam Rockwell (directed by a guy named David Jones, who is David Bowie’s son, I guess). I’ve heard naysayers dismiss Moon as a 2001 Space Odyssey rip-off, but it’s not. A lot of us missed this one, unfortunately. I loved the trailer and thought that it set a decent hook, but I can see how people could have gotten bored with it. I think the whole claustrophobic, single character narrative with a HAL 2000-like robot (whose name is Gerty in the film, voiced by Kevin Spacey) gave people the impression that it wasn't anything new or worth watching – it really isn't new per se – doesn't break any new ground – but it hearkens back to a time when science fiction was taken seriously, when it was all about the performance, which is a refreshing shift from all the hyper overdriven robot-ninja stuff that Michael Bay enjoys making (not that there’s anything wrong with that). It’s a lot of fun, and even more fun watching Rockwell at the top of his game.

Moon is about a miner named Sam Bell who’s getting ready to return home after a three year shift rotation harvesting a mysterious clean-energy phlebotinum on the moon. Weird shit starts to go down after he loses satellite contact with Earth and equipment begins to malfunction. Bell’s sanity is called into question when he starts seeing clones of himself running around doing stuff. It’s an awesome movie, and obviously written out of love of science-fiction with Hitchcockian themes. Moon is all about feeling isolated and thinking about home, and about what happens to the human mind after years of being alone and feeling claustrophobic.

Try this one out, you’ll love it.

A Scanner Darkly (2006)

This movie is one of a kind, done in a cell-shading animation style called Interpolated Rotoscoping, which is a style I've only seen used here. It’s a dystopian thriller with arcing themes of isolation, social-identity, authoritarianism, deception and addiction, but it has its comedic moments. Starring Keanu Reeves, Woody Harrelson, Winona Ryder and Robert Downey Jr, the future of ASC is under the constant invigilation of an ultra-invasive big-brother type network of surveillance, with the purpose of seemingly identifying the traffic of a new drug called Death, which suffers its users degrading brain function while simultaneously giving feelings of pleasure and euphoria. Keanu’s character – Bob Archer – is an undercover narcotics investigator who becomes addicted.

This is another adaptation of a Philip K. Dick novel (that dude’s brain is like gold, by the way, pumping out more marketable IP than Jay Z, George Lucas and James Cameron combined). Seriously, more sci-fi movies are made out of his books than any other author (apart from, you know, Stephen King and Shakespeare): Minority Report, Total Recall, Blade Runner, The Adjustment Bureau, among others. I guess A Scanner Darkly is an allegory for Philip K Dick’s drug days or something, but this is a digression. From Richard Linklater, the same guy who directed School of Rock, so he’s obviously going to capture the funny stuff, but it still remains tragic.

Most people I talk to haven’t seen this one, which is a shame. Great movie.

Sunshine (2007)

This is one of my absolute favorite movies OF ALL TIME – definitely in my top five. Sure, the third act is sort of bogged down by a shitty slasher catalyst, and sure, the science isn't entirely accurate – but the first two acts, combined with perfect direction and amazing performances by an excellent cast – and an awesome climax – completely overshadow any of this film’s fallibilities, not to mention that it’s breathtakingly beautiful.

Set in the year 2057 – a Q-Ball (A large blob of bosonic particles that resist fission and evaporation) collides with our sun, preventing it from fusing lighter elements into heavier ones, which causes it to die out or something. The point is that the sun is dying, and a multi-cultural collection of astronauts is sent to reignite the fusion process within its core with a stellar bomb roughly the size of Manhattan.

It’s a space-movie about a crew of scientists on a suicide mission to save the Earth. As they get closer to delivering their payload, stress builds and group-dynamics unfold in exciting and interesting ways . The themes are pretty straight forward: self-sacrifice, the indomitable human spirit, the majesty of nature and the existence of God.

In this editor’s humble opinion, Sunshine is one the best unknown movies in the past decade. If you haven’t seen it yet, do yourself the favor…

Children of Men (2006)

I don’t know if the things I look for in movies are the right things to look for? I don’t know if what I value in a story can even be measured by the same standards that professional critics have, I just know what I like. And I really like movies that create an exigent need for their resolution (in a good way), that can pull me into what’s happening on screen on an emotional level. Complete immersion, is what I’m going for, the next best thing to a book for escapism: those moments when reality sort of blends into undifferentiated experience, and you’re there, and it’s real, and nothing else matters. There are two scenes in Children of Men that are so complex, I can’t even begin to fathom the level of detail, choreography, blocking and planning necessary for pulling them off – some of the best seamless, single shot sequences I've ever seen: the car ambush, and the urban battle during the film’s climax. I’m drawn in every time, and the world just melts away, and I’m rapt.

Children of Men is another dystopian vision, which handles the apocalypse a bit differently. Imagine a future in which regulator sequences of our genetic code shut off reproduction. Women stop becoming pregnant, and society crumbles into a hopeless pile of heartache. I mean, things keep working – people still go through the motions – but it’s like everyone is dead inside.

Enter the first pregnant woman in twenty years, along with the plot catalyst. Starring Clive Owen, Julianne Moore and Chiwetel Ejiofor, Children of Men is probably one of the most tragically ignored movies of all time. Of ALL TIME. I’m laying the melodrama on a little thick you say? All right, I’ll stop.

The situation is that Mr. Owen’s character happens along a complex web of political intrigue, as an Underground Weathermen sort of movement endeavors to use said pregnant woman as a tool for their agenda, which is basically to snub the fascist, isolationist English regime that's desperately trying to control an influx of refugees from all over the place, since it’s the only government left standing.

My wife and I saw this movie when it came out, thinking it was going to be huge – nope. Crickets. I understand it’s gathered some semblance of a cult following since its box-office flop, but if you haven’t seen this move, you have to. You. Just. Have to.

Dredd (2012)

Nobody saw this movie. You want to know why? 1995 Judge Dredd, is why. Look people, you have to research your movies the same way money-market managers pick stocks. No time to research movies? NO EXCUSE! The more we go see the good ones in the theaters, the more production companies will make good movies. Granted, the stench of Sylvester Stallone’s version still lingers, but you have to be a meteorologist with this shit – this movie was pinging promising – promising – alert signals that indicated it was going to be effin’ amazing: Alex Garland wrote the script, Peter Travis was slated to direct, filmed on location in Johannesburg, and Karl Urban as the lead (give him a break, he’s a good actor). And the dude who wrote the comic book was going to be involved with the film’s production this time (his input was not allowed in the craptastic 1995 crapfest). O ye, of little faith. . . I KNEW THIS WAS GOING TO BE AWESOME. But it flopped, people were scared, I understand. No hard feelings.

Dredd was pretty straight forward: two Judges (future police officers vested with the power to sentence criminals on the spot, even to death) are trapped inside of a building controlled by a drug-lord named Mama (played by the very talented Lena Headey) and, naturally, in classic comic book fashion, they have to shoot their way out. There’s no subplot, no camp, awesome soundtrack. Character motivation is cut and dry. It’s just a good old fashioned action flick. I know that hyperviolence doesn't sit well on the palate of some, but it’s good. Trust me.

Thanks for reading folks – LET’S SEE YOUR LISTS! DON’T BE SHY!

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